VIU's application deferred

The latest news from Nanaimo is...there is no news.

“That was their decision, was to not make a decision,” said Bruce Hunter, VIU’s athletic director.

Canada West, he said, couldn’t come up with league schedules that were acceptable to the existing members and applying members.

The conference floated the idea of a Tier 2 that would include the three applying schools – VIU, UBC-Okanagan and the University of Northern B.C. – and recent expansion schools Thompson Rivers University and the University of the Fraser Valley.

“That wasn’t acceptable, really, to anybody,” Hunter said.


(Nobody found that acceptable? Really? I can think of some NCAA-eyeing schools who might be more inclined to hang around if they didn't have to play certain schools. Or not. Tiering may not matter much; see the comments below.)

There's going to come a time when geographic and temporal limitations make it near-impossible to have everyone play everyone else they want to play. The OUA's East and West teams play each other seldom (if at all, in some sports). Canada West's greater distances probably mean, eventually, an all-B.C. division and another with the Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba schools.

Virtually nobody wants to be second-tier, and nobody in this country wants to label others as second-tier, so it's not clear what will happen when "too many" schools join the same conference. Perhaps that's why the decision on VIU was put off for a year; they're not sure what will happen either.

Related:
No CIS for VIU, for now [Greg Sasaki, Nanaimo News Bulletin]

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3 comments:

  1. Canada west needs VIU like they need a hole in the head.
    Look at the two teams added recently, Fraser Valley and Thompson Rivers.
    TRU especially just brings down the overall calibre of the league.
    I say don't water down university ball in BC by needlessly adding weak teams.

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  2. Further to my parenthetical above, thanks to Neal Yonson for passing along some notes from the CIS AGM held earlier this month. It seems that tiering won't matter much; the CIS now does not allow schools to play a sport in the NCAA if that sport is already offered in Canada. Neal's posts are here and here, for those interested.

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  3. The CIS this decision is ridiculous and reflective of their overall incompetence...if they won't let teams like VIU and UNBC in; well I say those teams should look to the NCAA...

    ReplyDelete